~ Look in thy heart and write

Category Archives: Wider world

These are semi-regular updates from our snow day. Since I’m going to be getting cabin fever, the least you can do is read about it!

9 am – woke up to a windy, white world. It’s hard to tell with the blowing snow, but I’d say there’s considerably less snow than predicted. This looks more like 6 – 8 inches than 18. (Note the lower portion of the fence.) Not saying we should be having school today, by any means.

Everyone is now on a screen – Mom and Dad are working, Grey is on his Chromebook and Thane is watching Wild Kratts.

Backyard blizzard view

10 am – Adam made four hot loaves of fresh bread for our neighbors, to help keep starvation from the door. I invited the older kids over to entertain our kids with a rousing rendition of HeroScape. Then I realized that people probably needed to be able to, you know, get to our house. So I grabbed a shovel.

The snow on the stairs was taller than the door, but powdery and easily pushed aside. I cut my way to the road, noting that the front yard snow was waaaaay deeper than the back yard snow – the promised 18 inches at least! The snow filled it even as I cut it. I got slightly stymied by the plow berm, but then decided my friends have legs and they could step over it.

Great thing about elementary schoolers is that four of them are less work than two of them….

Snowstorms make getting to your neighbors a logistical exercise.

11 am – the kids read and played quietly for an hour, but then they spotted other little heads on the street, and booked it to get their snow gear on. Let’s all take a minute to appreciate having kids who can put on and take off their own snow gear without parental intervention… ah….

Now there are some hijinks next door that involve sleds and vertiginous drops. Despite the transport ban, the road is a bit busy for sledding. Adam’s taking his turn on the walks to try and stay ahead of the DOOM. (The sidewalk portion of what I shoveled had completely filled in. The walkway portion stayed bare.)

Little figures in the snow

1 pm – We went out sledding at noon. The DPW was attempting to plow our street, which was a bad combination. They asked us to stop sledding, so we did. I took most of the older kids in the neighborhood, and they’re currently wreaking havoc in Grey’s bedroom. Grilled cheese for lunch!

Grade school neighbors

2 pm – I found the snow from the back yard. It was all on top of the cars. A million thanks to both David and Tobin for the snow-blowing. The snow removal on this driveway is a classic reason you should never buy houses during glorious October weather.

There’s a car under there. Somewhere.

4 pm – Nothing like a day at home with your children while trying to do a full day’s work to make you really grateful for school. It’s just about time to stop splitting my personality and being full time at home!

7 pm – Best possible way to end a snow day!

Potluck with neighbors

10 pm – friends have returned to their home and our house is returned to a semblance of order. And yet it snows.

Back in 1988, a few folks had an idea about turning an old rail line in Stoneham into a trail. It was a cutting edge idea, at the time – the rails to trails projects were just kicking off. But the land was publicly owned, and it seemed like a good idea. Twenty-seven years later, the plan has final cleared (almost) all the hurdles required to break ground. My own part in this saga was trivial from that big picture perspective, but it was extremely illuminating for me.

Looking from the outside in, it can be awfully hard to get a hook into local politics. For example, googling my selectmen before a vote revealed… pretty much nothing (fun fact – my blog posts are like time 20 hits on nearly all of them). You can find some general information on what they do for a living. One or two of them have campaign pages, which reveal, well, nothing. Without a hook into the community, it’s hard to tell the obstructionists from the development-happy, the cooperators from the blockers, the sensible from the selfish. It’s almost impossible to educate yourself to vote responsibly when neither you nor anyone you know has any insight into these candidates.

Then came the Greenway. This project was so incredibly clear cut, I didn’t need a 20 year Stoneham veteran to explain the ins and outs to me. The pro was that we had an amazing project on public land paid for by state funds and sponsored by MassDOT. On the opposing side we had… uh…. safety concerns (which were bogus – the crossings will be much safer with the new work to be done) and uh… … The funny thing was that despite voting down a delay of a vote, and then voting down the initiative in the October meeting, no one could or would articulate a real & compelling reason why they didn’t think Stoneham should have this awesome amenity. The reasons, I believe, were all buried in relationships, history and some selfishness on the parts of the businesses who had been using the land for years with little or minimal compensation to the public. (I’m left to speculate. Anyone who’d prefer to explain the real reason is free to leave a comment!)

So in this complex community, I finally had a touchpoint. Using information available to me, I could see that the Greenway was good. This provided me the entryway into understanding more about the town. My involvement started out very lightly. In 2011 I walked the Greenway route. In May of 2013 I wrote about the project. In a sign of my outsiderness, I tried to reach out to the Selectmen using the publicly available contact information (which was rather unsuccessful). Then this fall, at the request of a friend, I went to the Town Hall meeting where the vote was both delayed and denied.

I was shocked into action. The excuses for failure were SO LAME. And they looked very much like they were going to successfully kill the project. I spoke at the meeting, and came to the attention of the advocates. Coming back from that meeting, I wrote a letter to the local newspapers. I reached out to the supporters, and helped collect signatures for a special town hall meeting. I engaged in the ad hoc group that pushed to get out the vote over a one month period. I walked door to door with my kids. I cold called 200 likely voters (a more pleasant experience than usual, based on the fact that 99.8% of the town thought the Greenway was a great idea). I called for the vote in the special Town Hall meeting, packed to the gills with hundreds of usually unheard residents who had answered our calls to support the project.

The Town Hall meeting felt like a movie where the hard work all pays off in the end

My portion of the effort was definitely at the eleventh hour and much less than that of others, but when the time came for drinks afterwards, I got the invite. I sat at a table of people who had poured years, tens of thousands of dollars and their hearts and souls into making the town a better plan to live, with no ulterior motivation. There was elation. There was exhaustion. There was a vague sense of unease that the opposition might find one more thing we hadn’t known about or thought about to block the project. I looked at those people, still struggling to put faces and names together, and settled into my place in the community.

Many things have come from this effort. The largest, of course, is that we now have a Greenway (assuming nothing bad happens from here on out). We have invited many residents of Stoneham to their first ever Town Hall meeting – hopefully some number of them become more engaged in guiding our community. I hope that the older entrenched interests in the town have realized that there are many more people in Stoneham than the handful of hundred who have historically done so much for the community, and that our planning needs to take both new and old residents into consideration. And I – I hope that I and my neighbors become more engaged in the town. Finally, enduringly, I have made some new friends in this adventure, who may be my friends in this great town for years to come.

What about you? Do you understand how your town ticks? Are you a voter? How do you figure out how to vote on local issues? How does a stranger come to become a local in your community?

The other day I went on a business trip with a young lady who didn’t – as part of her job – go on business trips all the time. She was super excited about the whole thing. The novelty of flying, the eating dinner with the client, the spending the night in a hotel all by herself. Her degree of enthusiasm shocked me regarding my degree of cynicism.

The author, in a random hotel room in…. Philadelphia I think.

Business travel has some similarities to backpacking. People who don’t do it are amazed by the concept. But when I’m actually on the trail (in the airport) I know that I’m still a rookie. Do I travel a lot for business? My “deal” with my husband is that I travel, on average, once a month. I’d say I might be traveling a little more than that these days. Once every three or four weeks I crawl on a plane and go somewhere for a day or two. When they posted a description for my job, it said 50% travel. I have worked with people, though, who spend 3 or more days a week, every week, on the road for work. (That might be listed as 80 – 100% travel – the folks who travel the most are project consultants who will spend ~5 days a week, every week, in a city which is not their own. That’s folks like Accenture & Deloitte. They also tend to work 90 hours in that week and have a massive burnout rate.)

I know I have a ton yet to learn about how travel best, but as I drove from the Richmond International Airport to the corporate business parks in Glen Allen, I thought that maybe you, dear reader, might benefit from what I have learned so far.

Rental Cars
This was probably my biggest rookie mistake. You might have rented a car at an airport once or twice. You take the shuttle to the rental car center, stand in line, answer mysterious questions about levels of insurance coverage and take a bet on whether you’ll have enough time between meeting and boarding to refill the tank. I once got into a situation in Los Angeles with Hertz where it took me almost 2 hours to finally get a car – and that was after a long transcontinental flight, with several hours of driving still in front of me.

But that’s how it works, right?

No. It is not. My dearest business partner, after he got done guffawing and making fun of me for such a rookie mistake, explained. Many rental car companies have a second method – a premier method. I now use National (I’m part of the Emerald Club). I make a reservation ahead of time. Then I walked directly out to a row of cars, decide which one I feel like today, climb in and drive off. I stop at the gate on my way out to give them my license. All the rest of that stuff: gas fillups, insurance etc… is just on record. It takes minutes.

The business partner who laughed at me has upped his game, though. Now he just takes Uber everywhere, and doesn’t bother with pickup or dropoff.

Security
When I travel overnight, I have four things that go into the bins in security: my laptop, my toiletries, my shoes and my wallet. Here are some keys I’ve found to never being slower than the person in front of me:

Always, always wear slipoff shoes. Wearing boots or even tennis shoes is a mistake. I prefer to wear slacks with socks so I don’t end up standing barefoot in the security line, but flats will do in a pinch.

Don’t keep your toiletries in your Dopp Kit (what my family calls that back you keep your toothbrush and hairbrush in). Keep them in a ziplock bag in the outer zippered pocket of your carryon, so you can just slide it in and out.

Don’t bury your laptop under anything else.

Pay attention to whether you’re Pre. Increasingly, they’re putting more people through the lines where you don’t have take anything out or off. This only helps you if you’ve noticed in time to skip the long line.

No sequins. I have this shirt I like to wear with a peacock feather done in sequins. (Saying that it sounds appalling. I swear it’s not that appalling.) But when I go through the body scan with it, I light it up like Christmas. Patdown time! You need to build a travel wardrobe of clothes that are comfortable, washable, professional, good looking – and don’t have metallic bits. This isn’t as impossible as it sounds. I like Dressbarn for helping me find qualifying outfits.

Points & Perks
I avoided signing up for frequent anything miles because I know myself well enough to know that I’ll never get around to figuring out how to use them. The few times, in the past, I’ve tried, my one or two trips a year were laughably short of earning me anything, and definitely not worth the aggravation. But now that I’m travelling all the time, I think it might start to add up to something meaningful. The best programs are the ones that have both points for tomorrow and perks for today.

In terms of perks, business travels are notoriously not price sensitive. My company pays for my travel, and doesn’t really case as long as I keep it within approved ranges. So offering me $10 off a rental car doesn’t actually encourage me to do much. But offering to make something simple, fast or comfortable counts for a tremendous amount.

Hotel Loyalty
There are two kinds of enterprise sales people at my company: Marriott people and Hilton people. (OK, they’re actually all Marriott, and fanatically loyal.) These companies make things better & better for you the more you stay with them. I have both sets of rewards (diluting the value of both – conveniently…) As an example, if you’re a Marriott Gold member, you get invited to the Concierge room. There’s late night snack food there, and a free breakfast in the morning. The non member people are downstairs paying $18 for their omelets. Way faster to zip through the buffet and grab a water on your way out, without having to pay. If you’re a platinum member – a coveted status – the hotel may be full for other people, but not for you.

Also, just so you know, business travelers never, ever, ever check out of a hotel. (I apparently get laughed at a lot when I travel – this was another moment.) Just leave your key (and your tip!) on the table on the way out. Your receipt was likely under your door in the morning.

The loyalty programs work together, so you are going to want to see if you can’t line them up. For example, as a Hilton person, I’d have a combo of Jetblue – > National -> Hilton family of hotels. This allows me to earn more points for the travel I’m already doing than if I just mixed and matched.

I’ll let you know how to claim the points as soon as I figure that part out.

Consistency & GPS
If you’ve ever been in an airport and watched a business traveler, they often look extremely confident. They’re walking fast, roller bag trailing behind like a patient puppy, eyes on the horizon. “Wow, they really know this airport well!” you think. Ha. They’ve never been here before. But there are two things that make this possible: consistency & GPS.

Every airport:

Has a bathroom right after you get through security and in baggage claim (business travelers never ever ever ever ever check a bag unless they’ll be gone more than a week)

Has ground transport next to baggage claim

Has a rental car facility where all the rental companies are (this may either be in the airport, or accessed via shuttles).

When you get off the plane, you immediately walk in the direction of the sign that says “Baggage Claim”, stopping at the first bathroom you see. When you get closer, you start looking for rental car center. It’s always clearly marked. When you get to the rental car center, you follow the signs for your particular company. The closer you get, the more information on what you need. If you watched me landing in Richmond yesterday, you would have thought I knew exactly where the car was I was going to drive and had been there a thousand times before. It was the first time – I just knew what signs to look for.

Once in the car, the hard part is trying to figure out how to drive it. (I drove a Prius this time. To my great surprise, I hated it. It beeps when you’re in reverse!) Plug in your phone, pull up the appointment for your meeting, and launch your GPS. I had no idea where I was or where I was going, but I got there in good time.

So, does it sound glamorous and fun? Is there anything here you’re glad to know? Is there anything here I’m completely missing?

There have been many discussions during this World Cup round whether this is finally the moment where the United States joins the rest of the world in not just FIFA-fever, but in a regular love of the game.

I remember when I watched my first soccer games. There was no soccer in my community or school – it simply wasn’t an option available. But the summer of 1998 I was home for the summer. I was working, but not SO hard. And the World Cup was on tv. I don’t remember any of the games I saw, or the teams. I do remember that it was sponsored by Snickers and there was a Snickers logo right under the score box for every game. I probably ate 10 Snickers during that World Cup, and just watching the game still makes me want a Snickers Bar.

My sons have a different experience of soccer. We’ve tried a number of things: swimming, aikido, dance (ill-fated), basketball. (They both really want to do t-ball, but the times for t-ball are completely unworkable with two working parents.) But they’ve done more soccer than pretty much anything other than aikido. I actually love the games and practices. I love sitting on the sidelines in a camping chair that smells like woodsmoke, next to MY friends, and watching the boys play. I love on gamedays, when all six fields are full of blue and white jerseys and parents and neighbors and friends – with little siblings putting together their own little games on the sidelines. (I’m impressed and grateful to the excellent run Stoneham Soccer Club for the program they’ve put together for our kids.) My sons know soccer better than baseball, football, hockey, basketball or any of the other classical American Sports.

Grey’s team, Greece, coached by our excellent next door neighbor, came in second for U8! I found myself engrossed and full of nerves while I watched these 8 years olds I have come to know and love do actual ball handling and real actual skills and passes. It was amazing to see how much they learned and improved in one year!

And it’s not just the prior generation. I’m a suburban WASP, surrounded by many other folks whose families have lived in the US for generations. And you know what we’re talking about these days? How great it feels to finally leave Ghana behind. How we owe Renaldo a debt of gratitude. How we’re caught between wanting to watch Messe play and not wanting to face him and Argentina on the field. Whether that biting suspension was a bit too much, and how hilarious it is that he fell on the ground and clutched his teeth after the whole biting incident. We’re messing up details and maybe not 100% sure on all our countries/claims, but we’re watching and talking.

I think the time has come for the international game to take its rightful place in the US. I think that we’ll not have to wait another four years – or watch Univision – to watch the game!

What about you? Are you watching the World Cup? Do you find yourself having to Google things in order to follow along with the conversations? Are you feeling inspired to go see your local MLS team?

The Northwestern has had its share of trouble in Season 10. It almost caught on fire, the steering broke & then half the fresh water was lost due to a leak. The men working 20 hour days doing physical labor were barred from taking showers. Edgar even brushed his teeth using coffee. (“Not half bad!” he opined about the toothpaste/coffee mix.)

But the one hit hardest by this was Matt. Watching how he dealt with his team piling on about his BO was one of the most instructive lessons I’ve ever had in how to deal effectively with a real problem in front of an aggressive group. Watch how he does it.

The classic definition of a Salty Tar

You could almost hear the relish in Mike Rowe’s voice as he called Matt’s aroma a “manly musk”. All the fishermen stunk, but Matt stunk worst. Eating dinner, his crew joked about how badly he smelled. They told him, quite literally, that he smelled like shit. Sadly, Discovery has not yet developed Smello-cam, but based on his reactions and the universal comments of his crew, his fragrance was appalling. But what could he do? The remaining freshwater was needed to run the engines. He wasn’t ALLOWED to take a shower. His work required him to work hard, and in working hard he sweated. He had no options for fixing the problem, and so he just grinned back and kept working.

But on deck, the situation got worse. The men of the Northwestern are not ones to delicately pass by the opportunity to discuss your aromatic characteristics in case your feelings get hurt. Every time he walked by they’d tell him how awful he smelled. They left him alone on the crab sorting table with a “crabalanche” in front of him because (they said) he smelled so bad. At one point a look crossed his face as he realized: this was not going away, and this was not going to get better.

Matt stalked off the deck.

Now, Matt has a temper. We’ve seen fistfights before. We’ve also seen our fair share of greenhorns running up to the captain complaining that the crew is not treating them right. (This is often true. See also: poor Myles on the Cape Caution). I wondered what he would do: take a forbidden shower? Show them how much less fun it is to work on a deck one seasoned hand down? Douse himself in cologne? Tell the captain that they need to lay off him, that it’s not his fault? Wipe his body down with a damp towel and hope it improves things enough to stop all the teasing?

He comes back onto the deck, stripped down. He takes off his shirt as he walks to the middle, leaving boxers and his wellingtons. (Still can’t figure out why he left his boots on!) Then, he jumps in the crab tank. In January. On the Bering Sea. In sub-freezing temperatures. In front of all his crewmates. He stayed in long enough to get totally wet, making a huge show of scrubbing his armpits with a bar of soap. As he comes out, his “friends” aim the saltwater hose at him to help him rinse off.

But once that’s done, his teammates thank him for fixing the issue and all the teasing stops.

I’ve never actually seen someone effectively counter that kind of personal, embarrassing, destructive abuse before. And Matt, with his tank-dunking technique, not only completely countered it, he used it as a way to make himself closer and more respected by the very jerks who were tormenting him.

I thought a lot about that last night, and I think I’ve isolated some of the elements that made this most effective.

1) He didn’t deny there was a problem
Matt didn’t try to deflect the issue at all. He owned it. “What day is it? I can say I haven’t taken a shower all year!” He didn’t diminish the concerns of his team, he didn’t remind them they smelled bad too, and he didn’t trot out the excuses for his stench. He just moved on.

2) He correctly judged the point of no return
He didn’t fall all over himself to fix the issue until it was clear that it wouldn’t resolve, and was escalating. He didn’t escalate the issue himself (see also: decking the other guys), but he didn’t start panicking at the first joke about his olfactory objections. He waited until the issue was clear & quantified.

3) He thought “outside the box”
Matt’s solution never crossed my mind. It probably didn’t cross his teammates, either. There was a solution to his problem (which did require great personal sacrifice). He was clearly thinking about it, instead of getting mad or feeling trapped. None of this would be possible without his problem solving creativity.

4) He fixed the problem obviously, and in public
If it had been me, I would have been hiding in my bunk trying to fix the smell. But Matt was smart enough to know it wasn’t just about the smell, it was about the reputation of smell. Even if he’d snuck in a surreptitious shower and fixed the actual issue, I bet he wouldn’t have gotten much credit for it. They either would have continued to tease him about his (now non-existent) smell, or made fun of him for caring that much. Making his ablutions in front of the entire crew was the ONLY way that he could permanently put this issue to bed. It is KEY that Matt did this in front of everyone – with a smile. Not only that, but Matt enhanced his reputation for toughness (a key on the Bering Sea) while erasing his reputation for stench. An illicit shower would have been more thorough, but it would have been massively less effective.

5) He engaged his critics in the fix
It may not have been part of his original plan, but when the guys turned the seawater hose on him, they were buying into his solution. He didn’t duck the stream, or get pissed. He took just long enough in the stream to make the other deck hands feel like he accepted their addition to his solution. As he walked off the deck (freezing cold, holy cow) his teammates were thanking him for solving the problem, grinning and clapping him on the back.

Matt managed to take a really uncomfortable situation of being ostracized and humiliated for his unavoidable odor, and turn it into a way to bond more deeply with his team and enhance his reputation. I was deeply impressed.

Now, I don’t work crab boats on the Bering Sea, and I’m unlikely to be in the exact same pickle. But I have never been able to figure out how to handle situations where you’re coming under fire for a deeply personal problem with no clear resolution. Matt just gave a masterclass in doing just that.

A fortnight ago I picked my careful way through icing puddles to the nail salon. I drove, even though it is two blocks away and I had time, because the sidewalks are nigh impassible. I asked for a pedicure, and picked a completely unprofessional, unseasonable, inappropriate robin’s egg blue. I watched ice skating and slalom while my toes were transformed. I carefully covered them in layers of thick socks and sturdy shoes for my homeward journey. It seemed impossible to me, in that moment, that there would ever again be a time when my toes would willingly encounter non climate controlled air.

A week ago found me rising at 3:30 in the morning, and pouring my dressed-before-bed children into a taxi, which wound in the predawn darkness to the airport. (Which airport was absolutely chock-full of other parents with other tired children.) My sons both blew my mind with their exceptionally awesome behavior on the first flight to Houston and the second, down to the small island of Cozumel – just across the channel from the playground of Cancun. The island is very small – a teardrop off the cheek of the Yucatan. We stood in unaccustomed heat in an outdoor line. The returning travelers looked tanned, relaxed and sad to be leaving. The pale and pasty newcomers, waiting for immigration, had anticipation writ large across our tired & dark-eyed features.

It was nine years ago that I last came to Cozumel. I was gravid in pregnancy, and longed for the weightless relief of warm waters. I noticed the changes as we took the short taxi ride from the airport to the resort (a new one – I discovered the one I’ve been to twice before is in the midst of a major remodel, which explains why it had no rooms available).

We are at the Presidente Intercontinental. Even the driveway made me feel like I was about to experience something rather more luxurious than my standard expectation – which was true. Our room is small, with two full beds and a fine carpeting of Legos (to make it feel like home). Strangely, there was no lamp on the balcony (the phrase “you get what you pay for” usually refers to what happens when you cheap out. In this case, a more-expensive-than-I-would-have-liked vacation has come along with excellent service and facilities, and within moments sent two guys to figure out how to get a light on the balcony.) But I have watched warm pacific waters through a peek-a-boo curtain of palms every day here.

I have taken somewhere between a bajillion and a quadrillion pictures (discovering that the lighting conditions on tropical beaches are actually quite challenging for people pictures and also that my children have come to see me as unwelcome paparazzi when I have a camera in hand). The resort has a fantastic child care offering (paid for as part of the overall price, which I appreciated), so all the days but two Adam and I have gotten to snorkel together, as we have on romantic vacations since we got married. We visited Mayan ruins and watched the wild, unchecked waves of the Caribbean. We saw many, many, many iguanas. The boys played in the sand, learned to love the pool, learned to swim way way way better and learned absolutely nothing about effective bargaining techniques. (Ask me about the shark tooth necklaces!)

Today we coaxed Grey, who had spent days snorkeling in the pool and avoiding the ocean, to join us for a snorkel. I was entirely prepared for it to be beyond his courage. It can be intimidating, seeing the vast seascapes of the ocean unfold as an unknowable world before you, the colors fading in distance. When we encountered a barracuda in the first five minutes, I was entirely prepared for a hasty retreat. As we, holding his hands, pulled him further away from shore and towards the coral-encroached sunken ship, I could hardly believe his courage held. But it did. We saw so much together. It was a moment past what I could have hoped for, where the vistas of his dreamscapes expanded. He also devoured, in a heart-warmingly familiar way, “The Westing Game” For a day or two there, any question pointed his direction was answered with an “mm-hmmm”. I loved seeing his sun-burnt nose stuck in a book. For all he was an early reader, I have had trouble moving him into chapter books. He prefers the easy familiarity of comic books. I hope that an affair or two with a good novel might change that.

Thane is, as ever, indomitable. Fearless in the water, he started the week nearly drowning himself. A pool noodle added just enough buoyancy for him to not drown mostly. Towards the end of the week, we just put him in a life jacket and let him go in the pool. (Actually, his wonderful caretaker Keri thought of that first. The Kids Club here isn’t just Screens R Us. She takes them to see the iguana habitats, and to go swim at the pool. Thane refused to join us twice today because she was helping him sew a very cool alligator puppet.) He also loved hanging out on the beach (I wonder how long it will take before he has no sand in his hair?) He and Grey have been amazing brothers this week. I just loved seeing his excited face and bouncing eyes above his third cup of strawberry yogurt every morning – so full of joy and wonder and gratitude.

While I was writing this on the porch, a fire dance broke out on the beach below. So cool!

I’ll post again once I go through the pictures. When Adam and I came here last, we had a film camera. This time we took pictures on: my good camera, my old point-and-shoot, Adam’s phone, my phone, my iPad. It’s funny how many changes a decade can bring.

We prepare our return back to our land of cloudy skies and gales. I confess to being unenthused by piled snow, chill drafts and stinging cheeks. I prefer the nuisance of sunscreen. But I feel thawed, rested, invigorated. I have connected strongly and deeply with the people I love most in this world. I have visited the Summerlands from the heart of winter, and won a respite from the seasons. I’ve seen lionfish and stars and smiles. I return to my labors with a lighter heart and darker skin.

My boys brought me breakfast, and my laptop, in bed this morning. About the time I’d caught up on all the latest hijinks of my Facebook friends, my beloved eldest son came in to snuggle me. “Whatcha reading?” he asked. (He is the world’s most obnoxious over-the-shoulder reader.) Well, I wasn’t reading much. So I pulled up “Glorious Dawn”:

That led us to reading about Black Holes (Grey made it through quite a heavy article on the topic). And that led us to an hour long Nova special on the nature of space:

Grey watched the whole thing, rapt. I did step away a few times, and when I came back he’d say, “Mom, you missed a lot.”

Following that, Grey wrote this letter to NASA:

Dear NASA I was wondering if we could go faster than the universe to see the universe EXPANDING, and if you could send a rectangular prism filled with water covered on all sides and launch it @ detect it and send the progress in our mail (redacted, but correct) if you could do that it would be very helpful. Is it nice being a scientist? If so i’m looking for a future job that could buy me a lot of books in a month. Make a lot of discoveries! Your friend, Grey , age Eight. :)

It’s just been a calm, quiet, lovely day – with time for Nova videos, Lego battles and Christmas music. As the first flakes of a major storm begin to fall, along with the cloak of darkness, we are together as a joyful family. This would all be even more peaceful if we weren’t headed to the Mythbusters: Behind the Myths show tonight in Lowell. I admit to some trepidation, between the 8 pm showtime and the major winter storm. But mostly, I’m excited, happy and content.

For those of you who do not leave in Eastern Massachusetts, you now have my permission to skip this post.

Those of you who live in the greater Boston area – not so fast.

This amazing tunnel runs under I93 and connects the communities.

I live in Stoneham – a small town that happens to be 11 miles from the soaring skyline of Boston. My community was hit hard by both September 11th and the Marathon bombings, but it’s generally a quiet place. I really enjoy living here. I have phenomenal neighbors. The schools are (so far) excellent. I can walk to just about anything worth walking to, including a used book store and a theater. (In the sadly lacking department, I CANNOT walk to good coffee. Woe!) Just yesterday, we had the annual Stoneham Town Day where the entire town turned out wearing their Stoneham gear and bounced in bouncy houses, painted faces, raised awareness and hung out.

A hundred years ago, my community – like so many others – had a railway running through it for local deliveries. Again, following the pattern, with the rise of the car the railway fell into disuse. Now in the 21st century, we’d like to reclaim our right of way and build a bike path alone the publicly owned lands. This is FANTASTIC. It will connect our community to two neighboring communities, going under the freeway. (I wrote about the really neat freeway underpass here.)

The project – the Tri Community Greenway – has been in progress for longer than some voters have been alive. But it’s ALMOST THERE. Here’s what they’ve accomplished:

The bikeway has obtained legal rights to the land with a 99 year lease from the MTA. All previous leasees’ leases have expired and the land is now legally free and clear for the public good of Stoneham.

With one exception (we’ll get to that in a moment), every business who had previously been using the public land has created and executed a plan to get the bikeway through the route. Special thanks to companies like Cleveland Fence who worked hard and negotiated in good faith to make it happen.

Most critically, the Bikeway has obtained federal funding for construction for 2014. Seriously, people, they can break ground before my kid hits third grade.

Of course, there’s one catch. One person has decided their driveway is more important than an entire community’s needs, and despite many good faith efforts by the Greenway committee, this person is refusing to move the 500 trucks worth of fill they put ON PUBLIC LAND and is now trespassing. They have been served with an eviction notice. I have to admit that it makes me really angry to think of one person ignoring both legal and moral obligations, who is willing to destroy a project that will serve the people of the community their business is in.

So… what can we do? First, there is a meeting of the Stoneham Board of Selectman on Tuesday, September 10th 2013. I intend to be there – with my children – to let the Selectmen of Stoneham know how important their leadership on this issue is to me, and to my community. This is not a project that needs you to open your wallet (see also: federal funding!). This is a project that needs you to use your voice to make sure that the community comes together to push it across the finish line.

You can find contact information for the Stoneham Board of Selectman here: http://www.stoneham-ma.gov/board-of-selectmen – let them know what you think! You can also find WAY MORE details about the greenway here, including the published plans, a map of the final route, the history of the project and community, and tons of pictures.

For your voting reference, I have also sent an email to every single one of the Selectmen, letting them know about my feelings on the topic. I’m including the replies below! I sent them all emails on 9/8/13 at 7:45 pm.

Ann Marie O’Neill – 8:50 pm 9/8/13

Dear Brenda,

Thank you for making your voice heard. The bike path is important not only because it will be a good asset for Stoneham, but also because bringing the citizens of Stoneham out to demand action from their leaders represents a major policy shift. We deserve better and we have been over looked for too long. Thank you for getting involved and thank you for encouraging your friends to speak out as well. If you are able to come to Tuesday’s meeting please introduce yourself. One of the most rewarding aspects of this role has been to meet my neighbors.

Thank you,
Ann Marie

Robert Sweeney – Chairman – 8:30 am 9/9/13

i support the bikepath always have feel free to call me

Thomas Boussy – Vice Chairman –

Strong Greenway supporter.

John Depinto – no response yet
Sent second request on 9/28/2014 11:20 am

My husband was raised in Saudi Arabia, and I am a product of the great Northwest. We met in college in Connecticut. But by the time we settled into the Philadelphia duplex on a busy Roslindale street that was our home together, we were in no way New Englanders. I dragged him to church that Sunday in mid August. The attendance that morning was sparse for a bright bride with a shiningly obvious and unscratched ring on her left finger. At some point during the coffee hours that followed, I learned that maybe thirty years ago the church had shut down for the summer. Then they started doing a round-robin with other community churches. Vestigial remnants of this arrangement still remain, as we swap combine with our UCC brethren once a year.

I was boggled. The attendance of Mineral Presbyterian Church was practically unwavering, unless the roads were tricky. But this much larger church just plain shut down over the summer, as though it was a school? That was a head-scratcher for me, filed away with other cultural oddities like why everyone seems to like Italian desserts (ugh!) and how any reasonable human being could prefer Dunkin’ Donuts to Starbucks.

Fast forward a decade and change, and here I am, on a sacred Sunday morning, not in church. In an extremely unusual move for my family, I’m going to fail to be at my home church for four consecutive weekends (I did attend worship at my brother’s church, so please don’t start the paperwork to excommunicate me.) And now I understand.

You can tell your New England friends of a particular vintage by whether or not they have – or had – a summer house. During the post war boom, as far as I can tell, most of the middle class of New England had enough spare cash to engage in a universally sought after accomplishment – the summer cottage. (Please note: I have done no research on this other than my own observations.) For a few months salary, an aspiring worker could get a place to spend weekends with his family. The richer folks had high-gabled houses on Cape Code. Medium income folks chose short houses – deceptively bigger on the inside than the outside – on other stretches of water, or Lake Winnepasaukee. Lowest on the totem pole were remoter houses, blocks away from any lakefront.

I have a few friends of sufficient age to have bought their summer cottage themselves. Most of my friends with summer homes, though, are of modest means themselves and inherited the houses – or are part of large families with shared ownership. One of the true old New Englanders I know is bitter because one side of the family (his mom’s) sold their summer family home, which he preferred to his dad’s side of the family.

In that quintessential youth of America, the children of New England were taken to the water to tiny cottages by their parents. Perhaps their father left them there with there mother all summer, returning on weekends once freed from work. The cities and towns of New England were depopulated during the hot months of summer.

As I have come to make friends with Old New Englanders, I’ve personally met more than a handful of these cottages. I am right now writing from West Island, just off the mainland from Buzzards Bay. It’s my third summer weekend here, and my third cottage. (Long story – we come with good friend.) I’ve seen the classic small cape house, decorated with field stone, natural wood and a nautical theme. (Have you ever wondered at the preponderance of sailboat themed decorations? It’s because an entire region has a second home decorated in nothing else!) The kitchens bear a striking resemblance to a ship’s galley in size and compact storage. The two lake houses I’ve seen have been grander, and both are now occupied near full time. I’ve visited a lovely little cabin on York Beach in Maine. Friends I know travel all the way to Nova Scotia for their lake house.

The economy of these houses has greatly changed in the last twenty years. The boom of the middle class second house ended abruptly in the 80s when real estate prices soared. They have not returned. Those still in possession of ancestral cape houses use them differently. No longer do they leave for the summer. Instead, the extended family may carefully parcel out the schedule of summer weekends in return for maintenance costs. Unclaimed weekends are sold to outsiders like me at a cost per day that exceeds New York hotel rooms. Often, they are only let in blocks of a week so that the houses do not stand vacant. Come Columbus Day, or earlier, the hurricane shutters are drawn and the linens are stored and the house stands cold and silent through the long New England winter – snow falling unseen from overlooking windows into the choppy gray waters.

To bring it back full circle, of course, this is why there was no service in my church during the summers. Literally everyone in the mildly affluent community was gone – to summer houses, beach houses, capes, lake houses, summer camps. There was no one left in the steepled town to worship.

The house whose weathered porch hosts me as I write is actually for sale for $280k. That’s rather less than I thought it would be, but rather more than I would be able to afford for a vacation house.

I don’t write a ton about my husband, Adam. There are many reasons for this: he says fewer cute things than my kids, he rarely brings home cool artwork from work, etc. But the primary reasons I rarely write about him is because he is fully capable of writing about himself, and rarely chooses to do so. But I’ll break my self-imposed embargo today to talk about him, because it’s Father’s Day, and it’s a time where we sit down to say the things we think so often and say so rarely.

Four generations of Flynn men: three fathers and one baby

My husband has had some great fathering role models. His father was also a good father. He talks to me often about the walks they took on warm Saudi nights with his dad and his dog – talking about everything and nothing. I miss Mike a lot – today especially. He was always convinced that we were the most amazing, the best. I often think of how proud of me Mike would be, which says a lot about how supportive he was of me while he was here. Mike died four years ago, but he remains with us in memory and thought.

My dad

I’m fortunate that my Dad is still around and doing cool stuff. I talked to him this morning, and his newest book is doing well. He did a book signing this weekend! But my Dad was always there – at every sporting event, schlepping me from location to location, teaching me how to drive or reminiscing about the layout of the streets in Seattle in 1969. He reaches out every time there’s wild weather in my area to make sure I know. He usually knows my forecast better than I do!

All this is to say, there are a lot of great dads in our lives. But the one I see the most of, whose work I can most appreciate, is my husband.

The day my husband became a father

Adam is a great father to our two sons – whose very looks are stamped unmistakably on his boys. There are so many things they do together: he’s their teacher in aikido, their “tickle and snuggle time” favorite, their morning-breakfast-short-cook, and their gamemaster. He is with them every day, and in every way, in sickness and in health. I love watching him wrestle with the boys. (80% of my family pictures involve the three of them locked in some manner of combat).

A hike on another day. I didn’t bring the camera yesterday.

Yesterday we went for a lovely family hike in the Breakheart Reservation, where Adam and the boys talked about snakes, beetles, optimum swinging mechanics and other related phenomenon. Today, we decided to spend Father’s Day being a family by going to the Museum of Fine Arts to check out the Samurai exhibit. (And the mummies. Because Dude! Mummies!) Once again, I got to watch my husband with my sons – explaining canopic jars, pointing out historical references, sharing the enthusiasm of the kids. It was – it always is – a pleasure and a joy.

Thank you, Adam, for the joyful and loving time you spend with our sons every day. I can only hope that they grow into men and kind, as loving, and as fun as you.